Thursday, December 27, 2012

As the title suggests, I
am lucky enough this winter to be spending the duration of my time off from
school, 5 weeks, in Mexico! I've been here since Dec 16th, staying with my
parents in the town of Puerto Morelos, near Cancún on the Yucatán Peninsula. The
place we’re staying is nice, a block off the beach with a view over the ocean
from the living room of our third floor rental. For the first two weeks I’m
based out of here, and then the real fun starts. A few of my friends are coming
down as well, and we’re embarking on a 2,400 mile roadtrip from here near
Cancún down to the state of Chiapas, across to Oaxaca state, and then back up
in a giant loop to where we started. During this we should see over 500 species
of birds, including many species that are endemic to Mexico or northern Central
America.

Before they got/get here,
my parents and I visited some of the local areas – snorkeling off of the beach
by our condo, visiting the Mayan ruins of Cobá on the day of “the end of the
world”. Somewhat predictably, at 11:11 the world didn’t end, nor at 12:21:12,
or at any other time throughout the day. Perhaps next time.

Our first arrival from the
states who was part of our initial group was my friend Luke Seitz, who arrived
on Christmas day after a long and arduous journey from Portland, ME to Cancun –
22 hours total travel time, and topped off by quite a fiasco of a pickup here
at the airport. Once we saw online that his plane had landed, my dad and I
headed to the airport to meet him, but of course it wouldn’t be that easy. For
some reason, the way that the airport is organized is that the only people that
can access the place where arrivals come out are taxis and resort shuttles – no
private cars or even pedestrians. In addition, the entire airport is made of
one-way roads that all take you back to the very start, so you have to do
massive loops each time you miss something. It ended up taking over an hour to
successfully get Luke, and required getting airport personnel to cross the
fence, go through the gate, fetch Luke, and bring him back to where normal
people were allowed to be. Definitely the most difficult airport meeting I’ve
ever been a part of!

Luke
and I have five days here, through the 30th, until the two remaining
members arrive from the States: Jess Johnson and Keenan Yakola, friends of mine
from Massachusetts. Between now and then Luke and I are going to be getting
SCUBA certified, which we started on the other day, and also going out to
nearby Cozumel Island, where there are 3 species of bird that occur nowhere
else. The underwater scene here is mesmerizing, with huge Spotted Eagle Rays
seen while snorkeling right off the beach, thousands of fish including small
colorful species and good numbers of big Barracuda – and even some Green Sea
Turtles on our first dive yesterday.

It
has been a great trip so far, and I look forward to seeing what the rest of it
will bring!

Friday, October 26, 2012

Shot of camp again - the photos in this post consist of some of my favorites of the season

All in all, if you hadn’t gathered
from all my posts leading up until now, it was an amazing summer. A unique
experience, living in the middle of the wilderness with 5-7 other people worked
out quite well since our crew was all good-humored, hard-working, and fun to be
around. The potential for social disaster in small field crews is a definite
reality, luckily one that was mainly avoided in this case.

The nature up there was out of this
world, both at the Canning and then in our post-trip to the Kenai Peninsula. We
only had 70 or so species of bird at the field site on the North Slope, but
some of them that I talked about above, such as Spectacled Eider or
Buff-breasted Sandpiper, are truly special.

Buff-breasted Sandpipers displaying

Of course, not all in the world is
birds, as I need to be reminded sometimes, and the mammals exemplified this
fact well. We ended up with 21 species of mammals throughout the whole trip,
including roughly 30,000 caribou, all members of the Porcupine Herd, a well-known
herd of animals that totals around 150,000 individuals whose seasonal migration
takes them right past the area of our camp. The large carnivore show was also
very impressive, like the American Serengeti as I said before, with eight
Grizzly (Brown) Bears, 6 Gray Wolves, and daily Arctic Foxes. The mammals did
not stop down in the Kenai area, illustrated with Black Bear and Orca, Mountain Goat and
Humpback Whale, Sea Otter and Moose.

Pacific Loon

Apart from the flesh-and-blood life
up there, the landscapes and other biota were awesome too, with massive
expanses of spongy tundra extending as far as you can see up on the North
Slope, to down in the Kenai where large evergreen forests dominate, where you
silently walk under the boughs of the conifers on a bed of needles, a world
apart from the other side of the state. One of the things that struck me was
how primal and wild most of the state still was, even in some areas off of main
roads – something that we never really encounter down in the lower 48 states.

American Golden-Plover

I know I have been trying to
describe what it was like up there, but there is no real way to convey the
experiences exactly as they were. There were the times when you’re slogging
through knee-deep water with a 30lb pack, 7 layers on, toting a shotgun, and
then the fog rolls in and you can’t see 20 feet away, no knowledge of where you
are, where anything else is, and it doesn’t really matter. An hour later the
sun could be out, the wind could die, and you could be stripping down to just a
thermal layer over your tshirt, and throw on sunglasses, suddenly able to see
dozens of miles at the frosted mountains standing vigil over the flatness. You
might be walking along and get the feeling you’re being watched, only to turn
around and see an Arctic Fox or a Caribou not too far behind you, just watching
you.

Sabine's Gull

One of the many unique experiences
that came with the trip up there was that of being cut off from the world. I’ve
traveled extensively in Latin America, but even there you go to an internet café
every few days at the most. Here you get your 10 minutes of satellite phone a
week, and that is it. No knowledge of news, politics, sports, gossip, anything.
And it was wonderful.

Our final tally for our 5 week season up
there was 288 nests found, of which roughly 80% failed due to predation by
Arctic Foxes, with another 3-5% unknown whether they were predated or if they
hatched. This is a slightly above average for nests found, but extremely above
average for predation. At other sites along the North Slope they had normal
success years, so it appears to have been an isolated occurrence, and one that
will surely even out over time, since it is just part of the rhythm of nature.

Red-necked Phalarope

It was an incredible experience
overall, one that I am honored to have been a part of, and definitely something
I’m considering returning to next year. Thanks all for reading, and perhaps I’ll
find some more topics to write about from the New England area before I travel
again – time shall tell.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

The evening of the return from our
glacier cruise out of Seward found us headed for Homer, a couple hundred miles
away on the other side of the Kenai Peninsula. Since the sun sets so late here,
only being dark for 3-4 hours in the middle of the night, we were still driving
in daylight even though we were on the road until 11:30 at night.

We stopped a couple places en
route, at a supermarket for some sandwich materials and then at the Kenai NWR
headquarters for the range-restricted Aleutian Tern, a breeding species there.
We were able to pick out one of the terns feeding over the lake just behind the
headquarters buildings, the first time I have seen a species of tern for the
first time after 10pm!

Eventually we arrived at our
destination for the night – a random road in the hills above Homer, where we
ate sandwiches on the hood of the car, which we then proceeded to sleep in. For
those of you out there who look down on sleeping in cars, our ride was quite a
comfy sleeping place in my opinion!

View over the town of Homer from near where we slept

The following morning we checked a
bunch of local areas in the downtown Homer area, and then spent the afternoon
at nearby Anchor Point, a little coastal promontory that turned out to be great
for seawatching. It was also a popular place for fishing, and the large number
of fishermen there would fillet their catch and toss the carcasses into the
surf edge, which served to attract lots of gulls, crows, and eagles.

This immature Bald Eagle was along the docks on Homer Spit, a peninsula right in downtown Homer

The eagle show was spectacular,
with about 20 individuals feeding along the coastline, flying along at eye
level less than 30 feet away at times. The congregation of close to a thousand
gulls featured a Slaty-backed Gull mixed in with the myriad Glaucous-winged
Gulls – this Slaty-backed that we found being the only one in the entire US at
that time apart from one other elsewhere in Alaska!

Slaty-backed Gull (left), standing out among the surrounding Glaucous-winged Gulls

Adult Bald Eagle dropping down onto a fish carcass

Landing gear down!

This eagle came and landed in a tree right next to us, this photo is not cropped at all!

That evening we went and searched
for Boreal Owl in the wood above town, unfortunately without any form of
success. While thinking about our plans for the next couple days, we realized
that we had gotten pretty much all of our realistic targets for the areas that
we had been to, and that we could make it back a day earlier than planned, thus
saving money on the rental car. However, this meant that we had to make it back
for 1pm the following day..

4am found us awake in the front
seats of the car again, having slept for another night in our luxurious sedan.
After checking in vain one last time for Boreal Owl, we started the six-hour
drive back to Anchorage, planning on one last birding stop.

We reached the town of Hope a few
hours later, and headed up to a nice dirt road that climbed through a valley
above town. Here we were able to add some more species that we hadn’t encountered
yet this trip, such as Spruce Grouse, Olive-sided Flycatcher, and many other
species with boreal flair.

View from the side of the road as we left the Kenai Peninsula

After here we went back to
Anchorage for our last few days, hiking around town a couple times and enjoying
the remainder of our time in Alaska, before flying home without mishap. I’ll
post once more about this trip as a recap of the work that we did and things we
saw.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

The view from the highway as you approach the Kenai Peninsula, the mountains on the other side are on the peninsula proper

After a couple days of lazing
around in Anchorage Alan and I hit the road again, this time shooting for the
Kenai Peninsula and the town of Seward. We snagged the rental car and headed
off on the three hour drive, which went past absolutely spectacular scenery,
with the usual snowy topped mountains set off by gently rolling forested slopes
and mirror-like lakes throughout.

Arriving at Seward, we were so
excited to finally be there that after quickly stopping at the hostel we were
staying at we immediately headed off to start birding. We checked nearby Lowell
Point and then the waterfront of the town itself, which combined had a
half-dozen new species for both of us, and other fun creatures such as my first
Sea Otters!

This cute little guy was right off the seawall in town

The following morning we headed out
on a glacier cruise, the reason for us going to Seward. This nine-hour boat
trip is mainly geared towards tourists who wish to see the spectacular
tidewater glaciers that calve blocks of ice off into the water below the
glacier. However, these trips are also fantastic for large numbers of seabirds,
both those breeding on the cliffs around the fjords that you visit, and also
species that are passing through on their migratory routes.

There are also some really cool
mammals in the area, from those that are aquatic to terrestrial species. I was
elated to finally get my first Orcas on this trip, a species that I have always
wanted to see! We got to observe a large pod with some really young animals in
it move right by the boat we were in, giving great views. In the water
throughout the day there were also many Humpback Whales and Sea Otters, with
smaller numbers of Dall’s Porpoise sprinkled throughout. From the terrestrial
perspective, on the rocky coast of one headland we were lucky enough to see
three Mountain Goats that had descended from their normally lofty abode to feed
on vegetation at the edge of the ocean.

Part of the pod of Orcas we saw, with a nice young one in the middle

A bunch of Sea Otters loafing around in Aialik Bay, they actually would rock back and forth in the water as we passed, trying to get a better look at the boat going by!

Of course, we were really there for
the birds, and they did not disappoint. As a foreground to the stunning scenery
we were treated to tens of thousands of birds, including nine species of alcid,
a family of birds that are the northern hemispheric counterpart to the penguins
of the southern hemisphere. One of the species of alcid, Kittlitz’s Murrlet, is
quite range restricted and has a really cool habitat preference. Occurring
almost exclusively along the edges of the Bering Sea, these birds have an
affinity for the milky gray-blue water that you only get at the base of
glaciers – where the glacial silt tints the water this special hue. Every
single one of the 31 Kittlitz’s Murrelets that we saw on the trip were at the
outflow of glaciers – pretty awesome.

Part of one of the Black-legged Kittiwake colonies at Cape Resurrection

Speaking of glaciers, we got to see
three massive glaciers on the boat trip, two that were landlocked and one
tidewater, tidewater being defined as a glacier that runs right up to the edge
of the ocean. The tidewater glacier that we saw, Aialik Glacier, was simply
spectacular. Roughly a mile wide and 300 feet high, this striking powder
blue monolith looms over the water below, where we sat in the boat with the
engines off and were privileged to watch a couple house-sized chunks of ice
plummet off of the face of the glacier, creating 5-6 foot swells that swept out
across the bay.

There is unfortunately nothing for scale here, but this is about a mile wide. Simply massive.

On the way back to harbor we
stopped at an island that was partially owned by the cruise company and were
treated to a buffet dinner as part of the price of the trip – not a bad way to
end the day! For carnivores there was a prime rib buffet, and then many other
vegetarian options followed by a gourmet cheesecake dessert. Not bad.

After this trip we had seen
everything that we wanted to from the Seward area, and rather than paying for a
hotel in Seward, we took the bull by the horns and jetted off on the 4 hour
drive to Homer immediately after getting back to the mainland, and Homer is
where I will pick up this narrative next.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

We spent two nights in Fairbanks, hanging out as well as returning gear to the Fish & Wildlife Service office and finalizing last
details of the summer. We birded at a couple places in town as well as going and seeing The Avengers in theaters - our first movie in quite a while! After our wrap-up work was done, we were free to do what we wanted until
our flights back on the 20th!

Alongside the highway there are areas with spruce forest extending as far as you can see, really striking landscape

We both knew people down in
Anchorage, so we headed down there next, stopping on the way south at Denali
National Park for a short while – a brief intermission in the 6 hour drive.
There was beautiful scenery on the drive, much of it featuring the enormous icy
crown of Denali in the background. We got to see a Black Bear with three cubs
in tow along the side of the road, and lots of fun birds, despite not locating
the desired Arctic Warbler.

Mrs. Black Bear and her cubs

Laura had a friend in Anchorage
that she had done fieldwork with in another part of Alaska a few years prior,
and so her and Alan made plans to stay with her friend Julie. A friend of mine
also currently lived in Anchorage, a former bander at Manomet back here in
Mass, and so it was nice to get to see and catch up with her! After one night at
my friend’s I spent the remainder of the time with Alan and Laura at Julie’s,
since Julie’s house was a much easier space with which to entertain guests.

Alan
and I wanted desperately to visit the Kenai Peninsula, since Anchorage is right
there next to it, and Laura also wanted to go dip-netting for salmon with Julie
for a weekend – so while they went and had a great time fishing, we went and
had a last few days of hardcore birding before the end of the trip, which is
where the next post will cover!

Monday, October 22, 2012

We woke up this morning and did one
last half-day of work, quickly performing invertebrate sampling so that the two
people staying behind had less work to do, for that day at least. Scott and
Alfredo were staying behind, while Elin, Alan, Laura, and myself departed.

In the late morning we heard the
whine of an engine and our ride out arrived, landing on the strip of land below
camp known as the “runway” simply a flatter drier area than most of the land
around.

Elin
and I took the first plane out, while Laura and Alan hopped on the second one
about a half hour after we left. It was a totally different world leaving,
really wonderful to be able to see the difference between the flight in a month
prior. In contrast to the snowbound land that we arrived in, it was now a lush
green landscape, spotted here and there with ponds and winding tributaries of
the Canning River.

Just to the left of center, to the left of the bend in the river shown here, is our camp

We
landed at Kavik as we did on the way in, once more to refuel, and summer was
already seemingly past peak here. Upon arrival I hurriedly made my way to the
building with internet there, and checked my email – consisting of over 600
messages from the past month. It was both a relief and a letdown to be connected
to the outside world again after a good amount of time away from it all.

The
flight over the mountains heading back to Fairbanks was also totally different,
with the icy mountains being replaced by gray shale and visible geology in the
craggy peaks. The valleys with rivers in them were lush and green, contrasting
vividly with the dead scree slopes above them. As we headed further south we
saw something that had long been out of our lives – trees!

Verdant river valley in the Brooks Range

No more snow except a few glaciers on the highest peaks

Upon
landing in Fairbanks real life caught up fast, and I was immediately calling
people trying to figure out transportation, a place to stay, and what the game
plan was for the evening. Thanks to wonderful logistical help from Manomet
staff Metta and Stephen, we were able to get a rental car almost immediately
once Alan and Laura landed, and were soon at our destination for the night –
the home of Patti Picha, an incredibly kind lady who opened her home to
travelers coming through the area, a friend of Scott’s who housed us for a
couple nights for free.

A view of the Yukon River as we headed south, showing the generations of meanderings of the river, with the darkest vegetation in the center being the oldest

Sunday, October 21, 2012

If the weather co-operates tomorrow
this will be my last night at the Canning River Delta. It is pretty strange whenever
you move from one stage of your life to another, it always seems like a partially
unfathomable concept until it happens. I won’t put waders on every morning, no more huddling
around the heater in the cook tent, and no more toting shotguns and bear spray
when away from camp. For that matter, no camp! No more wilderness either though, living among stark beauty untouched by the hand of man.

Not as many grizzly bear tracks in civilizations, such as these ones that I found in the muddy margin of a pond today

Today was your average foggy and
windy day here, mercifully bugless, and nice to have a few more nests hatch.
All in all it has been an incredible season and I have learned so much about a
large variety of things, from how to do complicated formulas in Excel to the
best way to find Pectoral Sandpiper nests.

This was the back of my field notebook for the season, with the pencil scrawl on the left the numbers of the nests I found, and the categories on the right being the different habitat classifications that we had

After we get back to civilization I
hope to write a scientific paper with Scott on some of the data collected this
year, likely studying how faithful to the nest site birds are from year to
year, quantifying it using our nest data from the past three years! We’ll see
how it goes.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Tomorrow is my last full day here,
weather permitting. It just struck me tonight – and it will be weird not waking
up here every day.

Today was fairly mundane, nest
checks for the morning, came back early afternoon due to the few nests to
check, and then spent the remainder of the day entering data. The highlight of nest
checks today was seeing the first Red-necked Phalarope chicks, four in one nest
and three near another, both with papa phalaropes in attendance. The chicks
were very striking, golden overall with dark flecks accenting the gilded
coloration and nice little caps.

One of the chicks was out and about a bit more, and super cute with his disproportionately large feet and legs

As of today we are down to only 50 nests active or so, roughly 17%
of our total nests of the season. However, at least it is nice now that some of
the nests are going inactive because they’re hatching, rather than just all
being eaten!

This baby Brown Lemming was also incredibly precious, about the size of my thumb. I kind of wanted to bring him home..

Thursday, October 18, 2012

The view over an upland section of the tundra, complete with numerous flowers, and hordes of mosquitoes

It is amazing how fast the brain
blocks out bad memories and experiences. Today Alfredo and I did a lemming nest
survey, which consists of walking a 15 kilometer transect line, counting all
lemming winter nests that you see from the line. You also must always stay on
the line, so you have your face in the GPS all day, making sure you’re exactly
on the line..for nine miles of walking.

Add the hot windless day that today
was, innumerable mosquitoes, and you have the bad memory that already seems like
a vague thought that may not have even happened. The bugs were so thick that I
smeared so many on the GPS screen from normal use that I had to wipe it off
because I couldn’t read the display – hundreds of mozzies around each of us at any
moment.

Once we got back we ate some pasta
with alfredo sauce and played more tossed salad, and now the day is in the
distant past. As we headed to bed we had some good looks at a few hundred
caribou by camp, silhouetted against the low sun by fog – gorgeous view and
some striking photos.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Pectoral Sandpiper chicks! Probably my favorite of the species that I got to see as chicks.

Woke up after 9 today, didn’t head
out until 11 – such a difference from only a week ago! Went out alone and
covered the 5s and 7s, where I got to see my first Pectoral Sandpiper chicks,
as well as a Semipalmated Sandpiper hatch. I even found a couple nests as well,
singles of Pacific Loon and Ruddy Turnstone.

As soon as our last rafters left
some new ones arrived! Practically a guesthouse on our beach now.. We invited them
up for hot drinks, and chatted for an hour or so before they headed back. Two
families and the girlfriends of the sons in the families – quite different from
the last crowd which was a professional tour.

We six also spent the evening after
they left playing a game that is a cross between charades and taboo called
tossed salad – a ton of fun. Now it is after midnight for the second night in a
row writing this, and only three more full days here – insane!

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Today was great fun, a nice break
from the normal work here. Woke up late, went to breakfast where we all had
freedom toast (French toast), freedom fritters (hash browns), and the
others partook in large amounts of bacon.

Following our meal all but one of us walked as a
group down to the 7s, checking the nests that were due as we went. At one point
we came across a really awesome migrant congregation of 65 Pectoral Sandpipers,
30 Semipalmated Sandpipers, and 2-3 Stilt Sandpipers, all hanging out in a
habitat that usually has a very sparse spread of birds – really really cool to see on this foggy morning.

Our destination was the main bed of
the Canning, which we reached in the late morning, and upon arrival began
gathering firewood on the blustery floodplain. In our first few minutes there,
while we were still getting firewood, a huge moose turned up out of nowhere,
coming quite close and enabling us to get lots of photos. Strange to see one in
a riverbed, many miles from any trees!

Not a great photo, but you can see that this guy is a bit out of his element

Once we had gotten enough wood we
got a fire going and sat there for 4-5 hours, eating smores, baked potatoes,
and listening to songs on portable speakers. A wonderful way to while away an
afternoon. After our patriotic fire we walked back home and arrived at a camp that
was on alert due to a bear nearby, down by the swamp just below the little rise
that camp is on.

Watching from the bluff, we got to
witness it approach the rafters’ camp, getting within 50 feet or so, but after
the eight rafters all waved and shouted it turned tail and headed away at a
pretty good clip, stopping about a kilometer away from camp. Really cool to see
it stand on it’s hind legs – I wish I had been in their camp for a better angle
and distance!

Mister bear below our camp

A couple hours later we went down
to the rafters’ tent and had some wine and conversation with them, nice to talk
to new faces and hear about their trip thus far. Back to work tomorrow, hope to
see some chicks!

Monday, October 15, 2012

The view from our tents over the swamp area, with caribou grazing below a fog bank

An uneventful day today, quite the
contrast from yesterday. Alan and I did the 3s, terminating 12 nests (finding them eaten by foxes) and
finding one Semipalmated Sandpiper, which I banded. We were back around 1:30, and spent the
afternoon lounging around talking, doing a crossword, and then I proceeded to
take my first nap of the trip, probably one of the longest periods in my life
I’ve gone without a nap!

An adorable Brown Lemming looking bemused

With tomorrow being the 4th
of July, we all have it “off”, so we are going to hike to the nearby gravel
river floodplain, doing our work on the way, and build a big bonfire to
celebrate. Should be a fun time, it will be a new area that we haven’t seen as
of yet this trip, out towards the mountains.

Down to only 78 active nests today
(27.3%), our net -11 day for just us two surely did not help!

The eggs in the new Semipalmated Sandpiper nest today - with one odd one out!

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Today was a notable day in many
ways. First off, I woke up to people talking near my tent, along with a
background noise of caribou grunts. I left my tent and stood with the other
people who were up, all of us watching the herd of 800 or so caribou all spread
out below camp across the swamp, their grunts and the plaintive calls of calves echoing across the landscape on this windless morning.

Brad was lying down on the slope
by camp, and had animals ~20 meters away from him at some points. Once the
close part of the herd left we went to the scope to see what else was around,
and watched two wolves loping across the river bed, and a bear feeding on a
caribou carcass that Brad had watched a wolf kill earlier in the morning – one
of the six wolves he had seen before most people woke up!

This morning is also the morning
that Brad and Mark will be departing camp, weather permitting, so we said
farewell as we headed out to work for the day. We had to wait for a while
before heading out, since the aforementioned bear walked right through where we
were headed, but since he kept heading east we were soon able to press on in
his wake.

After a few nest checks we were
down in the 7s, and as we looked south there was a wave of caribou cresting the
ridge – a living river flowing in our general direction. I quickly suggested
that we go lay down in their potential path, in a ditch near where I had seen
many caribou tracks worn into the ground recently. As they neared they caught
our scent, about 300m off, but once the herd leaders declared their ambivalence
about our presence, the rest of the herd followed along.

This male had a rack about as wide as a caribou is long!

This male had an eye on us for quite a while

For about 10 minutes we had a herd
of roughly a thousand caribou walking around us as close as 8-10 meters, calmly
feeding and ambling along. There were massive bulls with antler spreads wider
than a caribou is long, calves trotting along by their mother’s sides and
periodically suckling, and then hundreds of animals in between. They were
grunting and snorting the whole while, along with the bugs and the visuals we
were getting the full sensory experience.

You can see the winter fur being molted in the facial area

The limb coming out from the lower-left of the head of this caribou is in fact it's hindleg, being scratched by an antler

This bull was so dark that it was reminiscent of a moose

The grizzled faces look wise to me

We went on from this
once-in-a-lifetime experience to band a Semi Sandpiper and return to camp by
2pm – not too much work to do when there aren’t many nests to find or check.
But the excitement of the day was not over yet!

Around 4 or 5 I heard someone
exclaim “People!” Sure enough, two rafts had landed on the runway area below
our camp and were setting up tents. It turns out that the same raft trip showed
up here last year on the exact same date, they put in up in the mountains and
then float down the Canning for a couple weeks. Apparently they will be here
near us for three days! On top of it all it has been mercifully windy most of
the day – no bugs since early afternoon!